When Your History Is Blocking Your Destiny

2 Corinthians 10:4 (NLT)
“We use God’s mighty weapons… to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and to destroy false arguments.”

There comes a time when you have to ask yourself a real question: Why am I still stuck here? You love God, you’ve prayed, cried, fasted—and yet, there’s a familiar pattern that keeps showing up in your life. Maybe it’s that unhealthy relationship you can’t quite detach from, the dysfunctional family cycle that seems to follow you into every new season, or that inner voice that keeps repeating what someone else said about your worth. That’s not just coincidence. That’s a cycle. And it’s time to break it.

The Word tells us in 2 Corinthians 13:5 (NLT), “Examine yourselves to see if your faith is genuine. Test yourselves…” And sometimes, the most courageous thing you can do is look in the mirror with honesty and ask God to show you what needs to be healed—not just what needs to be fixed.

Take Tanisha, for example. She is 32 years old, has a successful career and is respected by her colleagues. Saved since she was 22, she deeply desires to live for God. However, she’s consistently finding herself in relationships with the same kind of man. They’re usually emotionally unavailable, controlling, and spiritually disconnected from the Father. Tanisha tells herself each time that this one’s different, but the end result is always the same: heartbreak, confusion, and regret.

What Tanisha doesn’t realize is that she’s been living with residue from her past—an unhealed soul tie from her first serious relationship at 19. This one was a doozy—a heartbreak that changed her in ways she couldn’t fully recognize. It left her feeling like love had to be earned and pain was just part of the package. It planted a lie in her heart that says, this is the best you can get. So even though her head knows better, her soul keeps choosing from a broken place.

That’s what these ties do—they affect how you see yourself and how you interpret love, safety, and worth. They dull your spiritual discernment and hijack your ability to choose wisely, especially in significant relationships. You begin to normalize dysfunction, mislabel chaos as passion, and accept red flags as just “flaws to work through.” But you were never meant to live like that. God desires wholeness for you—especially in the area of love and covenant relationships.

The Bible encourages us through Paul’s prayer in Philippians 1:9–10 (NLT): “I pray that your love will overflow more and more, and that you will keep on growing in knowledge and understanding. For I want you to understand what really matters, so that you may live pure and blameless lives until the day of Christ’s return.” When we don’t grow in our understanding of what really matters or guard what our hearts hold onto, we can easily become tangled in emotional and spiritual ties. We might continue the pattern of giving our hearts away too easily and steer our lives down paths we were never intended to take.

Soul ties and spiritual strongholds are real. They’re invisible chains, but they grip hard—especially when they’re connected to your emotions, your past decisions, or even generational behaviors you never chose but somehow inherited. Sometimes the hardest thing to fight isn’t what’s going on around you, it’s what’s rooted deep within you.

But God didn’t leave us powerless. 2 Corinthians 10:4 (NLT) tells us, “We use God’s mighty weapons, not worldly weapons, to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and to destroy false arguments.” We’ve been given divine tools to tear down the lies we’ve believed and the toxic agreements we’ve made in our souls. This part of the journey requires spiritual warfare, yes—but it also calls for honest self-reflection, repentance, and a willingness to walk away from anything that’s been secretly stealing your peace.

This is where healing starts. Not just the kind that puts a bandage on a bleeding heart, but the kind that pulls up pain by the root. That’s deliverance. That’s inner healing. That’s the Spirit of God reaching into your soul and doing what therapy, good advice, or time alone couldn’t fully do—break the chain and destroy the pattern.

If your history is blocking your destiny, then now is the time to rewrite the story. Not by pretending the past didn’t happen, but by letting God heal what happened in you because of it. You don’t have to be who you were. You don’t have to live in reaction to what hurt you. And you don’t have to stay tied to people or patterns that God is clearly calling you away from.

Invite the Holy Spirit to help you break free from every toxic tie and every unholy cycle. Healing is possible. Wholeness is promised. And your future is worth fighting for.

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

“Released – Breaking Free from the Things That Bind Us-Part 4: When Your History Is Blocking Your Destiny”, written for Springfield Fellowship © 2025. All rights reserved. All praise and honor to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.